Existing systems for generating software solution, such as planning and scheduling systems, comprises a set of components to assist the creation and communication of strategic, tactical or operational plans for a business organization. These components achieve a number of tasks defined by a software solution model, such as for example data checking, forecasting, feasibility analysis, optimization, simulation, visualization, what-if analysis, reporting and connection to organization information system.
Such solution generation systems often require important human interactions to specify, to develop and to integrate a software solution from the solution model, such as a planning solution. In particular, the development of efficient optimization models or analytic models often requires strong expertise in both the business domain and operational research. Further, very few experts of this type are available.
Vertical approaches target an industry-specific class of problems and can be used to overcome this limit of existing solution generation systems, like for instance IBM ILOG PPO and IBM ILOG TPO. They offer some limited levels of solution customization to adapt to specific needs. The components of such systems have also limited capabilities to cover task requirements that have not been identified beforehand, during the development of the vertical solution. They use in particular optimization models that cannot be easily extended. Consequently, vertical approaches only target well-defined classes of problems, which variability of solution requirements can be simply addressed for instance by parameter settings or configuration business rules.
Further, existing solution generation systems based on vertical approaches only provide full solutions whereas it is sometimes needed to only provide some services to be integrated in an existing system.
Another known approach relies on delivering industry frameworks containing standard-based model, processes or services for various industries as government, insurance, finance or health care. When focusing on the specific tasks to create the content of strategic, tactical or operational plans for various industries, standards are lacking.
For each domain in specific industries, there exists many scheduling and planning solutions that are already built with technical assets or components, such as optimization models, sets of business rules, widgets for user interface, data connectors to various data sources, etc. However, existing systems for generating domain specific software solution do not allow to generate a new solution model from technical assets or components pre-built in another solution model.
There is accordingly a need for a method and a system capable of generating a domain specific software solution from reusable technical assets.